Posts

We are approaching the one hundredth anniversary of women
first winning the right to vote, albeit in 1918 only land-owning women aged
over 30 were to be given the right to vote. The right to vote was won by campaigners who fought, often
literally, for the rights of women. Many women were arrested, tried and
convicted of criminal offences in respect of their protests and now, a century
later, there are calls for them to be pardoned for their crimes as homosexual
men were for theirs. Amber Rudd has promised only today that she will look at individual cases. But, what is a pardon? Strictly speaking, a pardon is an exercise of the Royal prerogative
of mercy. It does not expunge a conviction, nor does it mean that the person
pardoned was not guilty of an offence. A pardon simply removes from the
convicted person all penalties and punishments arising from the conviction. In
ye olden days it was thus a legal instrument used by the monarch to save a
person sentenced to death from the gallows. T…

There’s been an argument between police officers and lawyers
over the past couple of days on Twitter over whether an acquittal means
somebody is actually innocent versus whether a conviction means somebody is
actually guilty. In law the position is quite clear, if you are convicted you
are guilty; if you are acquitted you are innocent (you may already be shouting
at me that “not guilty” does not equate to innocent but you are wrong –
everybody is presumed innocent until convicted. If you are not convicted, then
you are innocent in law thus a finding of not guilty maintains a defendant’s
innocence and you can properly say that a person found not guilty is innocent). One of the more interesting points raised in the police v
lawyer debate is that a person can be acquitted in a criminal court but convicted
in a civil court. I think it’s an argument that is strong on its face but when
looked at in more detail is quite weak. So, it’s worth exploring in a little
more detail than Twitter provi…

There is a, very minor, story in today’s Daily Mail about a businessman sentenced for drink driving that has led to quite a few
people asking why he received a fine of £488 (actually, he was fined £367 but
the Mail got that bit wrong) and a 14-month driving ban while Chris Tarrant was fined £6,000 and handed a 12-month ban for the same offence, even though Mr
Tarrant had a much lower alcohol level. As I acted for the businessman, I’m tempted to say that the
difference must reflect the fact that one had a specialist drink driving solicitor
while the other was represented by a corporate crime expert, although I’m sure
that the truth is that the law on sentencing came into play. So, since people
are speculating about the differences in sentence I though we might as well
take a moment to look at how people are sentenced by criminal courts. We’ll use
drink driving as an example, but the principles apply to all criminal offences. When a person appears in court for drink driving the sentence
…

The Daily Fail Heil er I mean Mail today reports on
two awful Albanians who tricked the Supreme Court into letting them stay in the
UK despite their having lied to the wonderful, faultless British Government by
claiming they were from Kosovo. They report that “Dinjan Hysaj and Agron Bakijasi pretended to be victims of ethnic
cleansing when they came to the UK in the 1990s, but were ordered to leave the
country when their lies were exposed.” Lawyers for the pair wracked up bills
of “£1million in legal aid” (yeah
right – in fact the Supreme Court ordered a detailed assessment of costs and no
figure was quoted in the case but in any event a cool mil sounds unlikely to me)
fighting deportation by arguing that lying about nationality was not enough to remove
British citizenship… oh did we forget to mention that they are British citizens
and the case is really about whether they should be deprived of citizenship? The Mail says that this could lead to thousands more being
allowed to stay, alt…

Big news in the UK today is the case of Laura Plummer, a 33
year old British woman who managed to “accidentally” plead guilty to importing
Tramadol painkiller tablets into Egypt in a bizarre misunderstanding on
Christmas Day. She has now been sentenced to three years imprisonment by the
court. In Egypt it seems that the possession and importation of
Tramadol is banned without a special prescription because it is widely abused
in that country. Ms Plummer has said that she did not know the medication was
illegal in Egypt and had taken it into the country for her Egyptian boyfriend,
Omar Caboo, who is also 33 years old. According to the news reports I’ve read
of Ms Plummer’s account and those given by her family to explain her actions, Ms
Plummer obtained the drugs from a friend here in the UK. It is unclear whether
that friend was in possession of a prescription nor, if they were, how it came
to be that they built up such an extensive stockpile if they genuinely required
the medication –…

The Times front page carries a startling report today of a
rape trial that ended in acquittal of the defendant, Liam Allan, on the second
day of trial after the police revealed a cache of messages obtained by them
from the complainant’s telephone that they had decided to withhold from both
the prosecutor and the defence. It seems that in Mr Allan’s case the police had seized the
complainant’s mobile telephone as evidence and interrogated it to obtain all
messages contained therein. What happened next is unclear, the least damaging (to
the police officers involved) theory is that they simply did not bother to read
the messages. I’ll leave you to work out other possibilities. On day one of the trial, the complainant (who is still
entitled to anonymity despite the prosecution being so sure that her
allegations were entirely fabricated that they felt compelled to offer no
evidence against the defendant) gave evidence that she was raped and sexually
assaulted multiple times by Mr Allan. The …

I am a solicitor-advocate who specialises in motoring law with a particular interest in representing clients who have been charged with criminal driving offences involving alcohol, such as drink driving and failing to provide a specimen of breath.